Obesity remains a serious health problem and it is no secret that many people want to lose weight. Behavioral economists typically argue that “nudges” help individuals with various decisionmaking flaws to live longer, healthier, and better lives. In an article in the new issue of Regulation, Michael L. Marlow discusses how nudging by government differs from nudging by markets, and explains why market nudging is the more promising avenue for helping citizens to lose weight.

Armed with a computer model in 1935, one could probably have written the exact same story on California drought as appears today in the Washington Post some 80 years ago, prompted by the very similar outlier temperatures of 1934 and 2014.

Two long wars, chronic deficits, the financial crisis, the costly drug war, the growth of executive power under Presidents Bush and Obama, and the revelations about NSA abuses, have given rise to a growing libertarian movement in our country – with a greater focus on individual liberty and less government power. David Boaz’s newly released The Libertarian Mind is a comprehensive guide to the history, philosophy, and growth of the libertarian movement, with incisive analyses of today’s most pressing issues and policies.

Search form

Why Some Conservatives Oppose Vouchers

Medical researchers go to a lot of trouble to test a new drug. They record exactly what they’re administering, how often, and in what quantity. They solicit volunteers and randomly give the drug to some but not others. Thanks to decades of these randomized experiments, “House,” “Doc Martin,” and even your local GP have at least a clue as to what works and what doesn’t.

As I’ve just argued elsewhere, most education policy advocacy is quackery by comparison. Analysts routinely claim to evaluate one policy by looking at evidence from another. When they do present relevant evidence, it is often inaccurate, incomplete, and misleading. Many education policy analysts either do not understand or do not care what constitutes meaningful evidence.

So what’s the alternative? Can you reject the quackery and demand the same quality of research from the education policy community that you do from the medical community? The answer, to a surprising degree, is yes… but there are some interesting complications.

The greatest challenge is that there is so little variation in education policy within the United States that our ability to evaluate alternatives is constrained. There are now charter school, voucher, and education tax credit programs in numerous states, but these programs are quite small. Charter schools are the largest, but even they enroll less than five percent of students. To draw firm conclusions we need to see a variety of policies operating on a larger scale.

An obvious solution is to look at the experiences of other nations, but this poses a challenge of its own: how do we know if the outcomes we observe can be attributed to a nation’s policies rather than to economic, cultural, or demographic factors?

In principle, we could control for these other factors by mimicking medical experiments, randomly imposing a policy on one set of countries (the “treatment” group), while leaving a second group of countries as-is (the “control”). Not really feasible. Fortunately, medical researchers ran into this difficulty long ago—and found a way around it. Doctors can’t impose restricted diets and increased exercise on entire national populations in order to measure the health effects, but they realized that when such changes occur naturallythey can still study the results. These are called “natural experiments” and they exist all over the world and throughout history, not just in medicine but in education.

For instance, many countries have two or three different types of school systems operating side-by-side. By studying the effects of these within-country variations for a large number of nations, and over a vast swath of history, we can isolate the impact of the policies themselves.

Because this approach draws on very large bodies of evidence, the source citations alone for a study of this kind would be many times longer than the present commentary. But while the evidence itself is hard to compress into this space, the findings are not. When we review natural experiments in education policy fromthe 5th century BC to the present, and in dozens of countries in the modern world, clear patterns emerge. It turns out that education is generally most effective, efficient, harmonious, and responsive to families when educators are freed from government regulations, families choose from among a variety of schools, schools vie with one another to attract and serve children, and parents pick up at least some of the cost directly themselves—in essence, a free education marketplace.

But the historical and international evidence also indicates that government funding of private schools tends to bring with it a pall of regulation that grows over time; and schools hamstrung with this red tape underperform those that give educators and families more freedom. Though the regulatory burden is usually heaviest in older and larger programs, it can be seen even in small modern U.S. voucher programs.

But the news is not all bad. State-level education tax credit programs are another way of broadening access to the kind of education marketplace supported by the historical and international evidence. The early research suggests that they do indeed raise achievement, and improve efficiency as that evidence leads us to expect. But, unlike vouchers, they do not appear to hobble educators with red tape. That does not mean it would be wise to enact education tax credits at the federal level, but it is a path that nine states have already begun to follow and the results so far are promising.

These, at any rate, are conclusions I have drawn in systematically studying scores of school systems from classical Athens and Sparta to modern Chile and America. Much more such work can and should be done. And it might be, if Americans demand the same level of seriousness from the education policy community that they do from the medical community.